Given the nets of 4 cubes with the faces coloured in 4 colours, build a tower so that on each vertical wall no colour is repeated, that is all 4 colours appear.

Conway's Chequerboard Army

Stage: 3 Challenge Level:

Here is a solitaire type environment for students to experiment
with. It requires forward planning and logical thinking.

The narrator Christopher in the novel The
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time remarks that
Conway's soldiers is "a good mathematics problem to do in your head
when you don't want to think about something else because you can
make it as complicated as you need to fill your brain by making the
board as big as you want and the moves as complicated as you want"
(Mark Haddon 2003).

The NRICH Project aims to enrich the mathematical experiences of all learners. To support this aim, members of the
NRICH team work in a wide range of capacities, including providing professional development for teachers wishing to
embed rich mathematical tasks into everyday classroom practice. More information on many of our other activities
can be found here.